Friday Ramble - Little Blue

Weary of deep snow and icy cold, we (Beau and I) are a little tired of the color blue at times too, no matter how intensely blue the sky, shadows, snowdrifts,spruce trees or the cast iron crane standing out on the deck. Its migratory kin have been gone for months now, but our splendid metal bird is frozen in place, and it is well and truly stuck out there until springtime rolls around again. We like seeing it when we pull the draperies open in the morning.

There are some lovely words for blue in the English language: azure, beryl, cerulean, cobalt, indigo, lapis lazuli, royal, sapphire, turquoise, ultramarine, to name just a few. I recite them like a litany under my breath as I look out at our sleeping garden with mug in hand or break a trail into the woods.

Just when one is all wintered out and decides not to sketch another icicle or frame another photo of such things, another eloquent winter composition presents itself to the eye. Something curved or fragile or delicately robed in snow shows up and begs rapt and focused attention. Glossy bubbles dance in the icicles above a frozen creek in the Lanark highlands. Snow crystals adorn the evergreens overhead and make them blaze like diamonds. As Beau and I wander along, the last faded and tattered oak leaves from last autumn flutter down to lie on the trail at our feet. Pine and spruce cones cast vivid blue shadows in pools of early morning sunlight. Is there anything on the planet as fine as the scent of snowy spruce boughs in late January? Look closely, and every needle is wearing stars.

Small and perfect, complete within itself, each entity conveys an elemental serenity and equilibrium, lowers the blood pressure and stills the breathing, returns eyes and focus to simplicity and grace and just plain old being here. Beau looks up at me, grinning and wagging his tail, and for a minute or two, my doldrums take a step backward. These scraps of time on the edge of the woods will have to be enough, and they are. They are more than enough.

There are worlds great and small everywhere, worlds within and worlds without. Each and every one is a wonder to behold, to remember with my eyes and patient recording lens. Surely, I can do this for a little while longer.

Thursday Poem - The Moment

The moment when, after many years

of hard work and a long voyage

you stand in the centre of your room,

house, half-acre, square mile, island, country,

knowing at last how you got there,

and say, I own this,

is the same moment when the trees unloose

their soft arms from around you,

the birds take back their language,

the cliffs fissure and collapse,

the air moves back from you like a wave

and you can't breathe.

No, they whisper. You own nothing.

You were a visitor, time after time

climbing the hill, planting the flag, proclaiming.

We never belonged to you.

You never found us.

It was always the other way round.

Margaret Atwood,

from Morning in the Burned House

Wordless Wednesday - On the Fence

The Measure of Our Winter Days

Beau and I are out and about early on winter mornings, but salt and icy pavement are not kind to his toes so we keep our ramblings brief. After our first outing, we return home and fill bird feeders in the garden. Then we put a little something out for the squirrels who are having a difficult time too. When I pull draperies open in the morning, the first thing I see is their delicate footprints in the snow on the deck.

Indoors, heaps of reading material, candles, potions, puckish pursuits and small eccentricities are the measure of our winter days. Ditto sketchbooks, baking, baskets of mending, researching oddities like building igloos and straw houses, pottery, spinning, making authentic French pâtés and pasta. The soup cauldron has a place of honour on the stove in winter, and there is always a pot of something or other bubbling away on it. Then there is the old "what else can I do with this eggplant" exercise. Failing anything else, I plot another garden bed, pummel bread or make scones. Out of my midwinter restlessness, good and comforting things occasionally come.

If the weather was a little warmer, we would be checking out local bookshops and shopping for art supplies like sketchbooks and watercolor pens, but that is unlikely to happen for a while. Thankfully, shelves in the study contain a lovely stash of yarn, scraps of fabric (the powsels and thrums of Alan Garner's incandescent memoir), ribbon, paper, paint, and sticky stuff to keep us out of trouble. First and foremost (of course), there are books. There are never too many about, and passing a tottering heap of friends as yet unknown is always a happy thing. 

It is tempting to embrace the notion that life becomes smaller in winter, but that is simply not so. Like our magnificent universe, like this dear little blue world, like the Great Round of time and the seasons in which we spend our allotted days, life continues to expand - we are simply reaching outward in different ways.

Sequestered, Week 247 (CCXLVII)

It has been cold here in recent days, and icicles in the village grow longer and longer, impressive and a little scary. They chime like tubular bells when the north wind blows through them, and there is quite a performance going on. Does anyone remember that fabulous recording by Mike Oldfield?

Occasionally, ice stalactites shatter and plummet into the snowdrifts below, depositing what appear to be shards of glass. A noisy business, their journey to earth drowns out everything else around here: vehicles in the street, the wind blowing along the fence, hungry birds clamoring for food, squirrels chattering in the hedge.

Our roof is well insulated and does not produce many icicles, but it sports a few. The roistering wind dislodges them occasionally, and down they go, clanging and clattering. A little later this morning, I will wrap up warmly and go out to collect the shards before they impale themselves in Beau's paws. The fallen bits are wickedly sharp, and they are a hazard for canine toes. I will also use a broom to prune the icicles dangling over the back door, the deck and our path down to the sleeping garden. Me lurching about and brandishing a broom skyward - now there is a picture. 

This is a fine day for reading, thinking, drinking tea and just looking out the window. Why is that noble exercise called woolgathering? The only woolly stuff festooning this elderly person is a tattered (and much loved) old red shawl, and it has already been well and truly gathered. Everything else is cotton, layer upon layer of it.

Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

That, I think, is the power of ceremony: it marries the mundane to the sacred. The water turns to wine, the coffee to a prayer. The material and the spiritual mingle like grounds mixed with humus, transformed like steam rising from a mug into the morning mist. 

What else can you offer the earth, which has everything? What else can you give but something of yourself? A homemade ceremony, a ceremony that makes a home.

Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom,

Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

Across the Frozen Pond

Friday Ramble - A Colder Abundance

It may seem odd to be writing about abundance in January, but here we are in January, and that is just what I am doing.

This week's word appeared in the 1400s, coming to us through Middle English and Old French, thence from the Latin abundāns, all meaning "full or overflowing". There are lovely synonyms for the noun: affluence, bounty, fortune, plenty, plethora, profusion, prosperity, riches, wealth. As adjectives, Roget offers us the aforementioned "full and overflowing", as well as lavish, ample, plentiful, copious, exuberant, rich, teeming, profuse, bountiful and liberal.

We use the word abundance (or the adjective, abundant) in late summer and early autumn as we weed and reap and gather in, turn the earth for next year's sowing, harvest the bounty of the season and store it for consumption when the snow flies. Winter lies at the end of our labors but we try not to think of it at all.

Winter's eyes are as ardent as those of spring, summer and autumn, but they view the world differently, taking in frosted evergreens against the clouds, the light falling across old rail fences, deep blue shadows on snow, bleached and tattered leaves dancing in the wind, the thousand-and-one worlds resting easy in glossy icicles down by the creek. When sunlight touches them, the icicles are filled with blue sky and possibility, and they seem to hold the whole world in their depths. Cloaked in white, the round bales of hay abandoned in winter fields are the currency of summer, not simply photo opportunities but eloquent reminders of seasons passed. Each element cries out for attention, for patient eyes and a recording lens, for recognition, remembrance and a slender scrip of words, for connection, perhaps for love.

The long white season is about harvest and abundance too, but the gathering is inward, the abundance quieter and sprinkled with questions. Around this time of year, I always seem to find myself querying the shape of my journeying, the slow passage across the eastern Ontario highlands with camera and notebook in hand, the sheaves of images captured and carefully archived, even the eyes with which this old hen is seeing the world. The bright spirit with whom I did my wandering for so many years is no longer beside me. Beau and I hold him in our thoughts, and we go on.

Big life stuff, emotional ups and downs, questions and more questions—all are a kind of harvesting too. There is not the slightest chance that I will ever capture even a scrap of the snowy wonder and grandeur around me, and these days on the good dark earth are numbered, but in the warm darkness of my questions and my uncertainty, I gather everything in and rejoice.

Abundance is tea and cookies with an old friend. It's a ramble in the woods on snowshoes, a good book or three (or better still a towering stack) on the library table. It's a cauldron of soup simmering on the back of the stove, a bowl of clove studded clementines on the sideboard, Mozart's Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute) on the sound system. Small things perhaps and not exciting, but they are good and comforting things in a time when greed, cruelty, sorrow and disease are ravaging the world.

May there be light and abundance in your own precious lives this year. May there be peace. May there be kindness.

Thursday Poem - Snowy Night

Last night, an owl

in the blue dark

tossed

an indeterminate number

of carefully shaped sounds into

the world, in which, 

a quarter of a mile away, I happened

to be standing.

I couldn't tell'

which one it was

the barred or the great-horned

ship of the air - 

it was that distant, but anyway

aren’t there moments

that are better than knowing something,

and sweeter? Snow was falling,

so much like stars

filling the dark trees

that one could easily imagine

its reason for being was nothing more

than prettiness. I suppose

if this were someone else’s story

they would have insisted on knowing

whatever is knowable – would have hurried

over the fields

to name it – the owl, I mean.

But it’s mine, this poem of the night,

and I just stood there, listening and 

holding out my hands to the soft glitter

falling through the air. I love this world,

but not for its answers.

And I wish good luck to the owl,

whatever its name –

and I wish great welcome to the snow,

whatever its severe and comfortless

and beautiful meaning.

Mary Oliver 

Thursday Poem - The Snowman

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

Wallace Stevens, from Harmonium

Wordless Wednesday - Morning Light

Wandering Eye and Dancing Leaf

Little things leave me feeling restless in January. I meander through stacks of gardening catalogues, plotting another heritage rose or three, new plots of herbs and heirloom veggies. Hours are spent in the kitchen summoning old Helios with cilantro, fragrant olive oils and recipes straight from Tuscany. Candles are lit, and endless pots of tea are brewed, sunlight dancing in every earthenware mug.

When playing with with filters, apertures and shutter speeds, I am entranced (and sometimes irritated) by the surprising transformations brought about by my madcap gypsy tinkerings. Beau and I haunt the woods, peering into trees and searching for a leaf somewhere, even a single bare leaf. We scan evening skies, desperately hoping to see the moon, and we calculate the weeks remaining until the geese, the great herons and the loons come home again.

It may not seem like it, but change is already on its way. The great horned owls who make their homes on the Two Hundred Acre Wood are refurbishing their nest in an old tree about a mile back in the forest, and they are getting ready to raise another comely brood. The female is the larger of the two owls, but her voice is higher, and when she and her mate call to each other in the woods, we know who is where. It delights me to think that it is all happening again. 

While Beau and I were out this morning, a single oak leaf was teased into flight by the north wind and came to rest in a corner of the garden. The pairing of golden leaf and bluesy snow was fetching stuff indeed. The leaf bore in its poignant simplicity an often and much needed reminder. This is the sisterhood of fur and feather, of snowbound earth and clouded sky, of wandering eye and dancing leaf. 

Sequestered, Week 246 (CCXLVI)

On a cold morning in January, there is something comforting about a favorite mug of tea with half moons of orange, anise stars, and nubbins of clove floating in it. A few cinnamon sticks, and the picture would be perfect. No, it is perfect as it is.

Looking at the fragrant pond in my beaker, I can almost forget the north wind howling in the eaves, the snow and antarctic cold beyond the kitchen windows. Such is the magic of a potion thoughtfully brewed, then sipped slowly and appreciatively. A scented candle is burning, and there is a a lovely stack of reading materials on the library table. They too are happy things on a glacial morning like this. 

The plan today is making a pot of roasted vegetable soup, a fine undertaking for a frigid January morning. The veggies are roasted in the oven then run through the Vitamix with coconut milk and aromatic spices like curry, cumin and paprika, to name just a few. A bowl of the ambrosial stirrings will be served for dinner, and the rest will go into the freezer for other times. Lovely stuff it is, sunshine in a bowl.

Out of such small and mundane rites, a meaningful life is made.

Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

Do not be dismayed by the brokenness of the world.

All things break, and all things can be mended.

Not with time, as they say, but with intention. So go.

Love intentionally, extravagantly, unconditionally.

The broken world waits in darkness for the light that is you.

L.R. Knost

Dancing With the North Wind

Beau and I paused in the lee of a big old rock (a glacier dropstone) in the woods yesterday in an effort to get out of the bitter north wind for a while, but our strategy was an exercise in futility. There was no shelter to be found.

Boreas (god of the north wind, winter and snowstorms) howled through the whiskery trees, gulleys and wooded alcoves, crept under our woolly hats, up our sleeves, down our collars and gusted into our eyes. The way the old guy was blowing, it is a wonder any snow was left on the ground, but snow there was and plenty of it.

We were chilled to the bone and soaking wet when we arrived home, but cheerful after a ramble in the woods and the fresh, frosty air. Chattering teeth? Oh, yes.

Friday Ramble, First of the Year

The Winter Solstice came and went, and light is slowly returning to the world. Northern days are growing longer, but the effects of December's turning are felt in their own good time. It will be a while before we sense real change.

In January, it is tempting to remain indoors and curl up in the warm with a mug of tea and a book, but Beau and I need to be out in the woods now and again, however short our stay on cold days. Rambles nourish and sustain us, and there is always something to see when we are out and about.

"Crunch, crunch, crunch" went our booted feet yesterday as we made our way along the trail. It was surely our imagination this early in the year, but the woods seemed brighter than they were a few days ago. Sunlight sparked through the trees, and everything glittered. The light was sublime. We felt as if every jeweler's vault on the planet had been looted and the glittering contents spilled out at our feet.

There was flickering movement in woodland alcoves and hollows; shadows rippled and flowed like water as squalls gusted through the whiskery trees. The shadows seemed deeper and more intense, more blue. Here and there, a leaf or a tiny sprig of frozen evergreen poked out of the light snow, and the color was a hopeful thing, one that not even the biting north wind could carry away in its gelid paws. I always wonder why there are not more words in the English language for such blustery air currents.

Resolutions this year??? With so much suffering, turbulence and uncertainty in the world, my heart is not in making resolutions. There are no lofty aspirations scrawled on paper or etched in stone, just the same old work in progress. Beau and I are lurching onward together, breathing in and out, in and out, in and out.

As we go along, we will keep the words of Zen master and lay teacher Osaka Koryu in mind. When we breathe in, we will breathe in the whole universe. When we breathe out, we will breathe out the whole universe. We will go along together, paw in paw, and we will simply keep putting one foot in front of the other. As always, we will talk with the great trees and look for the light.

Thursday Poem - January

Dusk and snow this hour

in argument have settled

nothing. Light persists,

and darkness. If a star

shines now, that shine is

swallowed and given back

doubled, grounded bright.

The timid angels flailed

by passing children lift

in a whitening wind

toward night. What plays

beyond the window plays

as water might, all parts

making cold digress.

Beneath iced bush and eave,

the small banked fires of birds

at rest lend absences

to seeming absence. Truth

is, nothing at all is missing.

Wind hisses and one shadow

sways where a window's lampglow

has added something. The rest

is dark and light together tolled

against the boundary-riven

houses. Against our lives,

the stunning wholeness of the world.

Betty Adcock from Intervale

On the First Morning of the Year

May there be light and abundance in your life,

robust health and sweet contentment.

May there be adventures and laughter,

May there be magic, all kinds of it.

May you find joy in your creations.

May all your lessons be gentle.

May fulfillment grace your life.

May there be peace on your journey.

Remember, this world is a richer

place because you are in it.

Haud Hogmanay, Happy New Year

Wishing you abundance, cheer and rude good health in this shiny new year, wishing you many a festive beaker (or a noggin or a dram) too. Be warm and safe this evening, wherever you are, and whatever you are doing. Mind yourself!

Be wise, be wild, be light of heart. Go forward in peace. May there be many fine adventures on the road ahead of you. May every cup you hold in your hands this year contain a star or two and have a little light dancing in its depths. May all good things come to you and your clan (or tribe) in 2025. Blessed be.

On the Last Day of the Year

It seems right to begin the last blog entry of the calendar year with sunlight shining through a fog over the Clyde river on a late December morning. The river meanders through woodlands, valleys and farm fields in the eastern Ontario highlands, crafting deeper channels wherever she pleases and loving every winding turn she makes along her way. A crone among waterways, she mutters, grumbles and roars as she journeys south to merge with the Mississippi river in Bathurst township. In some places the river is shallow and not much wider than a creek, but she is a wild thing, and she has serious attitude from her birthplace in Clyde Lake to her journey's end. 

During winter trips to the Lanark highlands, I liked to find a perch on the bank and listen as the river sang under the ice. Sometimes, she seemed to be performing a duet with the wind, and there was a kind of Zen counterpoint at work, two unbridled entities utterly independent in their contours and rhythm, but meticulously interwoven and seamless in their harmonies.

Putting all notions of complex orchestration and conventional choreography aside, there's lovely music in the air on icy winter days. The sound of moving water has always been a leitmotif for me, and I often think that my existence can be measured in rivers, currents and intermittent streams rather than cocktails, jewelry, pairs of shoes and coffee spoons.

In springtime, I watched as willows on the far shore leafed out and turned silvery green, then looked on a few weeks later as the river overflowed her banks and asserted her claim to the fertile fields on both sides. In summer, I counted bales of hay and captured images of deer and wild turkeys feeding nearby at dusk. In autumn, the sun went down over the same willows, so golden of leaf and limb that they seemed to be spun out of sunlight or stars. In the now, snow frosts every tree and branch, and the glorious light shining through them dazzles my eyes.

Thank you for coming along with me on Friday rambles this year. May there be many happy rambles in the shiny new year that is waiting for us just beyond the horizon. May there be abundance and healing and light for all of us. 

Sequestered, Week 245 (CCXLV)

Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

To hope is to gamble. It's to bet on the future, on your desires, on the possibility that an open heart and uncertainty are better than gloom and safety. To hope is dangerous, and yet it is the opposite of fear, for to live is to risk. I say all this to you because hope is not like a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. I say this because hope is an ax you break down doors with in an emergency; because hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from annihilation of the earth's treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal. Hope just means another world might be possible, not promised, not guaranteed. Hope calls for action; action is impossible without hope.

Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities

Icy Morning, Rising Sun

On a cold morning a few days ago, we (Beau and I) admired the icicles dangling from the eaves of an old house near home. There was a raw north wind, and we thought it would bring this winter's handsome confections crashing down into the snowdrifts below in slivers and shards, a noisy and rather dramatic end to be sure.

Silly us, the wind will not be the architect of such creations, at least this time around. Temperatures in the village will rise today, and our icicles will dwindle and fade away, strange doings at a time when temperatures are usually well below zero, and ice stalactites often reach several feet in length.

Liking the way icicles catch the morning sun on our morning walks, we are feeling cheated. In a day or two (of course) temperatures will plummet, and the village will be a  sea of ice again. As above, so below. Here we go again, cleats on our boots. walking sticks with ice prongs, salt and sand and the whole shebang.

The Between Days

Here we are again, poised at the heart of the liminal interlude bookended every year by the Winter Solstice and the shiny new year only a few days away. These winter days are a precious (and much needed) breathing spell between the two holidays, and I like to think of them as the "between days". 

It seems as though 2024 just got here, but we are bidding it farewell and considering 2025 with its unknown possibilities, adventures, trials and ordeals. A few gentle adventures next year, and fewer ordeals, please. No cancer surgeries, perishing furnaces, madly tilting garden sheds and crumbling chimneys. Enough already.

Holiday shopping (what little there was of it) was wrapped up and tucked under the little tree in good time this year. A thousand and one cookies were made, and fruitcakes, coffee beans, tins of baking and bottles of wine were delivered around the village. Gift bags, ribbons and wrapping paper have already been folded and put away for another time, and the silken rustle of the tissue as it was smoothed and pleated into neat squares was pleasing to the ear.

Now there is stillness in the little blue house, and after days of toing and froing, there is time for rest and reflection. Who knows what Beau and I will be doing on New Year's eve? Seasonal viruses are running amok in the village, and there is a possibility we will be home by ourselves, safely sequestered with wonderfully smelly candles, a wedge of fine old cheddar, a good book, tea, gingerbread and clementines.

I made a lovely big pot of Bigelow's Constant Comment tea this morning, and the kitchen was filled with the fragrance of oranges and sweet spice. Snow sparkled through the south facing window, and the kitchen was filled with silvery dancing light. As we leaned against the counter and waited for the kettle to sing, it seemed to Beau and I that the best part of the holidays is the clamor and bustle when the house is filled with loved ones, comfortable, together and happy to be here.

There was laughter and camaraderie in the kitchen, and around the old oak table in the dining room. Endless mugs of tea were poured and mountains of munchies were consumed. There was an eloquent silence in the darkened garden when everyone went home after our revels ended. Looking up at the moon, we (Beau and I) I thought of our departed companion, and we sent him our love. Blessed be.

Thursday Poem - Burning the Old Year

Letters swallow themselves in seconds.

Notes friends tied to the doorknob,

transparent scarlet paper,

sizzle like moth wings,

marry the air.

So much of any year is flammable,

lists of vegetables, partial poems.

Orange swirling flame of days,

so little is a stone.

Where there was something and

suddenly isn’t, an absence shouts,

celebrates, leaves a space. I begin

again with the smallest numbers.

Quick dance, shuffle of losses and

leaves, only the things I didn’t do

crackle after the blazing dies.

Naomi Shihab Nye

(from Words Under the Words: Selected Poems)

Merry Christmas

May the blessings of light and community be yours.

 

A Tree Full of Reindeer

What could be more cheerful than a crabapple tree full of reindeer on the morning before Christmas? The reindeer are in threes, a number dear to my heart.

Several inches of snow fell overnight, and most of today will be spent clearing white stuff from the threshold, the walkway in front of the house and the driveway. First I will clear snow from the deck and the steps down into the sleeping garden and excavate a track around the yard for Beau.

At the moment the stairs down to the garden cannot be seen, and my companion is up to his tummy in snow whenever he goes out. He is not a happy camper. It is still dark outside, and it will be for some time, so our snow clearing will have to wait for an hour or two. First, a fragrant mug of coffee to get us going... 

On such mornings, my neighbours are out moving snow too, and we call greetings to each other as we work. The first intrepid souls to finish their own exercises simply pick up their equipment and move on to assist whoever is still beavering away. It takes a village (or at least a block) to move this much white stuff out of the way, and move it we do, working together and happy to be doing so.

Why are there so few words in the English language for snow? The Yupik tribes of Siberia have forty or so, and the dialects spoken by the indigenous peoples of Canada's far north have at least fifty. Surely we can do better.

Sequestered, Week 244 (CCXLIV)

From mild days and rain to bitterly cold days, high winds, ice everywhere and several inches of snow forecast for today. This must be December, and I must be parked in the storm tossed highlands of eastern Ontario.

Weather notwithstanding, I take my first tea of the day (Darjeeling) out onto the deck and pose it in a snowdrift. The colors are pleasing, and I take one or two photos before my fingers turn numb, and I decide to retreat indoors. 

Once indoors, I pop my mug in the microwave, light a nice, smelly holiday candle (spiced chestnut) and switch on my reading lamp,. Then I locate my red shawl and pick up a good book. Sequestered? Oh yes, we are.

Solstice Wreath, Five Alight

Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

I believe an artist has to remind herself or himself, in other words, that when you write or paint or compose music, you draw in mysterious ways on the courtesy and genius of the community. It is this sensitivity to gifts welling up unbidden, this awareness of the fate of the community, no matter how ego-driven or self-absorbed a writer or artist might become, and no matter how singular the work, that divides art from commerce.

In traditional communities all over the world, this ethic of communal reciprocity, in my experience, is what separates acts of selfishness from the work of leadership. The role of the artist, in part, is to develop the conversations, the stories, the drawings, the films, the music—the expressions of awe and wonder and mystery—that remind us, especially in our worst times, of what is still possible, of what we haven't yet imagined. And it is by looking to one another, by attending to the responsibilities of maintaining good relations in whatever we do, that communities turn a gathering darkness into light.

Barry Lopez